Let's explore Kotlas

Kotlas is the small city where the baby house is located. It's home to about 60,000 people, according to its Wikipedia page. Kotlas isn't a historic, picturesque city; neither is it a shiny, new city.  But it is, according to the doctor we were working with, representative of the type of city that a lot of Russians live in.  It's a blue-collar town, filled with working people.  A lot of the buildings are Soviet-era structures, solidly built, relatively utilitarian, and in varying stages of repair.  The city is shabby in spots, but manages to be interesting and occasionally quite charming.  The layout and architecture and mix of buildings is noticeably different than it would be in an American city.   On the inside, the hotel, baby house, grocery store and restaurant were well cared for, and very clean.

So I've already posted about the Kotlas baby house, where Elena currently lives.  Let's explore more of the city.  Here's an interactive map of Kotlas; I've marked the location of the Sovietskaya Hotel.  If you zoom out, you can see some other points of interest in the surrounding area.  The baby house is about one mile due north of the hotel.

View Kotlas, Russia in a larger map.

We took a little time to walk around Kotlas during the one full day we were there.  Although most of the day was sunny, the minute we stepped out for a walk it clouded up, so we unfortunately lost the best light for photographing the city. 

Here's the street outside the Sovietskaya Hotel:

The blue building is apartments and retail; the Sovietskaya is just to the left.  It's a U-shaped building; the gambrel-roofed structure next to the blue building is a new wing, and the darker brown building next to that is the older wing.  We had a corner room, third floor, on the street end of the older wing.

So anyway, the highlights of our walk were the The Church of St. Stephan of Perm and the bell-tower by the river.  The church was built in 1788, and the adjacent bell tower in 1825.

And the train station:

 The station still has its statue of Lenin:

 And a historic train out front:

More after the jump:

Here's a commercial building just a block away from the hotel, taken during a break in the clouds.

City Hall, across from the hotel, taken from the hotel room.  Lenin still looms from the upper right corner:

Here's a simple vernacular building with some decorative siding.  Simple, but well-proportioned.  The lack of a lawn seems typical of the area, although many houses have a row of birches in front of the house.

 And a log cabin.  This construction was much less rare than you might think--it;s actually pretty common.  There's something of a tradition of log structures in this area of Russia (which we'll show in a later post).

This is the intersection just north of the hotel:

And here's a shot of the train tracks, taken from the vehicle bridge south of the station.

The next morning, when we headed to the airport, we got a shot of the control tower:

 And the terminal building. The sign across the top says AEROPORT KOTLAS (the initial A in aeroport is cut off).